"The
United States, China, Japan, India, Pakistan, parts of Europe. We got
news that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has artifacts, so we kept writing
them and they didn't respond. One day, they finally told us they have
it, and that they will hold it until Afghanistan is a free state and a
museum is established. This Afghan gentleman and my mom were trying to
establish an Afghan Museum. The Pacific-Asian Museum is helping out…"
Seventy-five
percent of the Kabul Museum's relics were looted during the twenty years
of war. The rest would be destroyed later. After Dr. Mustamandy passed,
his wife Mehria Rafiq Mustamandy took over the struggle for the preservation
of Afghanistan's cultural treasures.
The
plunder of Afghanistan's treasures went unnoticed in the time when the
Mujahidin took Kabul and established a governance led by Burhanuddin Rabbani
and Ahmed Shah Massoud. Although this government seeked just democracy,
factions within the regime had different ideas. Killing persisted, as
did countless lootings.
Out
of this chaos sprang the Taliban, who in 1996 brought uneasy peace to
Afghanistan, and sent Rabbani and Massoud back to the northern provinces.
The Taliban's ways; skinning people alive, burying them alive, shooting
women in the back of the head, banning education, offering whippings for
beard-shavings and the like brought an attractive 'calm' to a war-ravaged
country, according to Afghan sources.
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Gandharan Statue-head |
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Pakistani
conservatives raised an eyebrow to all of this, with their interest in
creating the same kind of pure Muslim state which they dreamed for themselves
when given independence from the British in 1948. They issued their secret
service to support and train the Taliban. Osama bin Laden, who was helping
to support purist Muslim states out of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, the Philippines,
Sudan and other countries, built an army of 15,000 Pakistani secret service
agents, sometimes called the 'ISI'. The ISI trained young Pashtuns in
the way of the Taliban.
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